On October 25, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) signed a grant agreement with the Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in Vientiane, the capital city, to provide grant aid of up to 1.415 billion yen for the Project for Improving Secondary School Environment in the Central and Southern Provinces.
The project will improve secondary school facilities and furnishings in four central and southern provinces of Laos, enhancing access to education and bettering the learning environment, thereby contributing to improvements in the quality of lower secondary education.
Toward achieving the national goal of rising above the status of a least developed country by 2020, Laos has an increasing need for industrial human resources, equipped with literacy for handling advanced technology and basic computational capacity. Although Gross Enrollment Rate (GER) for primary education is 118.4 percent (2015), GER for lower secondary education, which corresponds to middle school in Japan, is merely 78.1 percent, and the eighth Education Sector Development Plan for 2016–2020 sets a target of improving GER for lower secondary education to 85 percent by 2020. In the central and southern provinces, in particular, where the poverty rate is high, GER lags severely behind the national average (50–70 percent) due to factors such as a lack of a proper educational environment because of deteriorating and inadequate facilities, and it is urgent that measures be taken to address the situation.
The project will expand and rebuild 37 secondary schools in four central and southern provinces, and provide furnishings, such as desks and chalkboards. This will increase the number of classrooms from 212 to 454, allowing an additional 2,620 students to be accommodated, which is expected to increase the student enrollment.
In addition to this project, JICA carried out the Project for Improving Secondary School Environment in the Southern Provinces (2014), grant aid, and is carrying out other projects such as the Project for Improving Teaching and Learning Mathematics for Primary Education (2016–2022), a technical cooperation project, thereby providing comprehensive support for improving educational environment in Laos.
Original source: JICA
Published on 25 October 2017
